Reading Makes me Question Myself

I have, once again, written somewhere else instead of writing here.  I apologize (a little) and I hope you will check out the post instead of hating me forever.

It's late. Don't judge.

So, like, what is the evolutionary advantage of the human nose? Like, what is the evolutionary reason that we are not all Voldemort's running around with two slits in our faces?

Or, better yet, if we came from monkeys, why don't we have monkey noses? What makes our nose evolutionarily superior to that of a monkey? Like, is it something about rain sliding off of it easier? Isn't that what are eyebrows are for...?

Guys, I seriously need to know the answer to this question. I can't sleep right now, and this is seriously why. Someone needs to answer this question for me.

I keep looking in the mirror, and the longer I spend staring at my nose, the less I understand why I have it. And the more I question whether I will ever be able to sleep again.

Only you can prevent wildfires.

The question is, does that unique ability have something to do with your nose?

Post-Graduate Writer seeking...actually good writing

As many of you saw in this video, I've been writing for almost as long as I can remember.  Throughout the various seasons of my life, writing has been for me a hobby, my identity, my anti-drug, and the one social activity I felt most comfortable with.  But recently, writing has become that old winter coat you keep in the closet, that has lots of good memories, but for whatever reason--maybe it's too small, maybe the fabric has a weird pattern--you don't like to wear it outside anymore, and when you do, you can't stop thinking about what everyone else must be thinking about your stupid coat.

The metaphor isn't perfect: I still love writing.  I can't count the number of books, articles, essays, poems, blog posts, and stories I've read in the past year that have inspired my own creation.  I get phrases, characters, scenes, and settings in my head all the time, as I always have, and I know they are just asking me to write them.

It's the sitting down to write them that I dread.  Perhaps you've noticed, in reading my blog, that I have a disturbing tendency towards didacticism.  I don't like it, and I'm pretty sure most blog readers don't like it, but I can't seem to help it.  It's not what the English Department at Calvin College taught me to write, and it's certainly not what I read.  And arguably the worst part about my didactic writing is that it's not even good didacticism.  It I could pump out an allegory or fable, I would be at least a little impressed.  Even essays with well-cited sources, perhaps with charts and pictures, or anything like that to actually support my position would be welcomed at this point.  But all I seem to be able to do is write long posts with sort of morals at the end.

And this is true of more than just my blog posts.  My NaNoWriMo novels for the past two years have been abysmally moralistic in not-so-subtle and not-so-artistic ways.  In 2011, one of my characters was gay and had a mind-numbing soap-box speech about his struggles and how no one is on his side, and in 2012, every artistic choice I made was checked against my desire to have the characters be gender-progressive and good role models for struggling young girls and boys.

Calvin College and its fantastic writing professors taught me art, where to find it, how to find it within myself, how to create it, and how to hone it.  But Calvin College's liberal arts core, as well as my education classes and history classes taught me that the world is broken, that there are things terribly wrong with all corners of society, and that the only thing capable of fixing them is the love, the grace, and the justice of God.  They also taught me that God works through his people, his "agents of renewal" (kind of a buzz phrase at Calvin...) to bring light to the darkened places, that fighting for social justice is a way that God's people can be conduits of his grace and justice, bringing The Kingdom here on Earth.

Now, technically speaking, good art and effective social justice are not two sides of a coin.  They can coexist in this world; they can even be of one energy flowing together.  The only problem for me is that I seem to have missed the lessons where smart, talented, and good people taught me how to create that socially just art without boring people to death.  So what I've got instead are poor copies of someone else's greater genius that neither emphasize beauty in creation--as art does--nor prompt valuable change--as social justice does.

When I look back at the works I did in high school--the short stories, the poems, and the one novel--I, like most artists looking back at old work, cringe at all the mistakes all the shoddy craftsmanship.  But honestly, I wish I could get back to that.  I wish I could go back to just writing to write.  The artistry might suck, but it would feel better.  It would stop being this embarrassment that I stow away in a dark closet somewhere and hope never to have to wear in public.  I'm doing nobody any good by writing the way I do now.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to get back into the heart of writing, I'm definitely willing to hear them.  What I'm attempting right now is reading fiction, lots of fiction; good fiction, bad fiction, fiction I like, and fiction I don't, in an attempt to jumpstart my desire to create.  I've also got a lot of writer's-workshop-type books around my apartment that I'm trying to use.  And I've started a writing discipline again, where I write for at least an hour a day for no one at all, maybe on one project, maybe on small one-shot things, or maybe on something that will never see the light of day.

I don't like funks.

What's Mine is Ours

The other day, my boyfriend Ben, his roommate Steve, and I went to CMU's campus to play some badminton.  Steve and Ben picked up the racquets and net--because, strictly speaking, I'm not a student, per se, so I needed to fly under the radar if I could--and then we tromped around the athletic facilities looking for a suitable place to set up and play.

I don't know much about CMU's athletic facilities, and I was just following the guys around, going through doors they opened and up stairs they gestured to, but there are evidently only two areas outfitted for badminton play.  The first place we went to was also outfitted for volleyball, and was evidently outfitted so well that the official volleyball team was scheduled to practice there, therefor we had to leave.  So we went to another place (which, as I recall, was referred to by a set of letters that stood for some words, but I can't remember the letters or the words right now) that happened to be swarming with eager basketball players.  They were just playing pick-up games, and there were four hoops, but evidently, one of the courts was designated for badminton-specific use.  It wasn't being used as one; someone had taken down the net and a bunch of people were playing full-court basketball.

As I am, strictly speaking, not a student, I let Ben and Steve handle the court situation.  Since the badminton-ness of the gym was officially sanctioned, both Ben and Steve felt that it was within their rights to ask the basketball people to split into half court and let them set up the net for play.  They promised we'd only be there for an hour at maximum, and gave them ten minutes to wrap up their game.

Needless to say, it was an awkward arrangement; forgetting the fact that both halves of the basketball court remained in use throughout our little badminton match so that we kept nearly beaming people with our racquets, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that we had just inconvenienced a bunch of people, not to mention that those people were all generally bigger and sweatier than Ben, Steve, or I.  As my Girl Scout training helped tie the knots to secure the net, my escapist tendencies imagined a wonderful world in which such socially awkward situations could be avoided.  "Maybe I could buy a badminton net..." I mused.  "If I owned a badminton net, we'd never inconvenience big basketball guys again, and we could play whenever we wanted.  That would be great."

Obviously, the thought was short-lived.  I am not going to buy a badminton net.  CMU has them, and I'm even allowed to use them as a guest of Ben and Steve (though I didn't, strictly speaking, follow protocol on this particular visit) and then I don't have to pay for any damages, I wouldn't have to find a place to store them, and I always have a place to play, even when it's raining or when I don't own a yard.

The longer we played, the less I cared about how we'd inconvenienced the basketball guys.  I mean, yeah, I still felt bad about getting in their way, and I couldn't help but think how ridiculous it must have looked to them: three people pushing out ten people just to play some vaguely old-fashioned game with pathetic-looking skinny racquets and a dinky little birdie.  But when they stumbled into our part of the court, they apologized and one of us would say, "No worries," and when we hit one of them with one of our gaming instruments, we apologized and they would say, "No worries."  And at the end of 40 minutes, Ben was too tired to keep going (playing single to Steve's and my doubles) and we packed up and left, giving them their court back.  The rules set down by the CMU athletic facility authorities did their work, the compromise was struck between us, and everyone survived and got to enjoy a bit of physical exertion.

Public goods tend to do this, I think.  Public parks, public schools, public hospitals, public sidewalks...they force us to interact with each other, to practice compromise, tact, and civility.  They may not explicitly teach us the inherent value of the people around us, but when fair rules are in place, they implicitly teach us to acknowledge other people's rights as designated by those rules.  Public goods give us access to thoughts and feelings that are not natively our own, but that might help shape, redefine, or strengthen those thoughts and feelings that are.

Private goods are nice: I like owning a car, in large part because it means I am not at the mercy of the bus routes and schedules, and I don't have to worry so much about the size or shape of the things I need to carry from point A to point B, as long as they fit somewhere in my trunk or backseat.  My car does probably cost me significantly more than bus fare would, between gas, insurance, maintenance, and depreciation, so I always have to make sure I'm getting what I pay for, that my car remains a better option than the public transportation system.

But sometimes I pass a bus stop where people stand waiting, or I watch people climbing on or off the sectional behemoths as they stop on the side of the road, and I wonder if I'd feel more connected to the people around me if I were forced to get that close to them every day.  I live alone, I don't have a job, and my neighborhood is pretty quiet, so I can avoid human contact for days if I want to.  Add my car into that, and the isolation only deepens.

For me, for now, this isolation is primarily just a sort of depressing reality.  I don't see many people, and most people don't see or talk to me.  But over time, such separation from society could conceivably become something more sinister.  If public places teach us compromise and tactfulness, over-privatization could cause those skills to atrophy, perhaps to the point where not only am I not explicitly seeing the value in the lives of other human beings, but I start denying those human beings' rights as human beings.  If I were to become completely self-sufficient, without need or desire for any public goods, that sufficiency might become my only goal, the only thing I fight for, in which case, the needs of others seem of little consequence to me.  Suddenly, I don't care about the other people on the road, their convenience, or their safety; I only care that I have someplace to be and I've got to get there, so I'm going to do what it takes to get me there, no matter the cost to others.

I'm fairly certain this hypothetical is an exaggeration, an extreme form of isolationism that probably only occurs in concurrence with some form of serious social or mental deficiency.  Nonetheless, as I played badminton that day, I wondered if, perhaps, there might be a connection between a person's consumption of public goods and their political leanings.  Could someone who frequents their public library ever consider school vouchers to be a socially responsible response to the decline in public education?  Would someone who only ever drank water out of a Brita filter think that Social Security needed to be completely revised, not just privatized?

Obviously, someone who uses public transportation has a vested interest in that transportation's funding and subsequent quality, but does habitual use of public goods and services influence a person's outlook on public goods more generally?

What about you?  What public goods and services to you rely on most heavily, and how do you think they've influenced your understanding of the value of the public?  I really want to know.